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HP Shows Improving Financials in First Quarter

To the relief of the company, its customers, and its shareholders, Hewlett-Packard posted better-than--expected financial results for its fiscal 2005 first quarter ending January 31. Worldwide sales were $21.5 billion, up 10 percent from the same quarter last year, and net earnings were just under $1.2 billion, not counting a $116 million settlement that HP paid to end a long-running lawsuit with former workstation maker Intergraph.With the cost of that settlement, investment losses, and taxes taken out, HP's earnings came to 32 cents per share, up from 30 cents per share a year ago.

The troubled Enterprise Servers and Storage group had sales of just over $4 billion, up 9 percent; it posted an operating profit of $71 million, which was diminished by a $33 million charge related to restructurings. Sales in the Industry Standard Servers unit, which sells X86-based servers, were up 19 percent, to $2.35 billion; unit shipments grew 23 percent in the quarter. HP believes that its X86 server market share during the first fiscal quarter is the highest it has posted in any quarter in three years. Sales of Itanium-based Integrity servers doubled compared with last year and made up 18 percent of sales in the Business Critical Server unit, which had sales of $890 million in the quarter overall, a decline of 2 percent compared with last year. That means Itanium server sales were about the same as last quarter, about $160 million. The company said HP-UX servers were up 3 percent, but that NonStop servers were down 19 percent and that AlphaServers continued to decline. HP did not say by how much.

Intel Talks Up Dual-Core Chips

If Intel wants anything, it is to prevent being perceived as being behind rival Advanced Micro Devices, which is angling to get its dual-core Opteron chips into the market sometime this summer. Intel desperately wants to get its "Potomac" and "Cranford" Xeon MPs, which have 64-bit memory extensions and HyperThreading simultaneous multithreading on each single-core chip, into the field ahead of the dual-core Opterons.

According to the latest Intel roadmaps, the Potomac and Cranford Xeon MP processors are being collectively grouped together as the "Truland" family of chips, and they could be announced at Intel Developer Forum in early March, for delivery in late March or early April. Intel will be delivering a Pentium 4 Extreme Edition for high-end gaming machines and workstations, but this won't be much good in servers. While Intel says it has over ten multicore projects underway in the labs, what it really needs in order to compete with Opterons in the server space is dual-core Xeon DPs and MPs and dual-core Itaniums. The "Dempsey" dual-core Xeons, probably for two-way machines, and probably using 65 nanometer processes, are expected in early 2006. That gives AMD about a six-month lead on Intel in the server racket. Intel is clearly betting that 64-bit support plus HyperThreading are good enough against dual-core Opterons without HyperThreading. We'll see.

The current implementation of the "Montecito" dual-core Itaniums (the original Montecito was single-core and was due last year) is now expected to start shipping at the end of 2005, and is expected to be certified in systems beginning in early 2006. Montecitos are expected to have an incredible 1.7 billion transistors, almost all of which covers the 24 MB of L3 cache memory on the chips. They are expected to run at between 1.6 GHz (like the current Itanium 2s) and 2 GHz. Montecitos will, however, have about three times the performance per socket, thanks to HyperThreading and other tweaks. Moreover, Montecito will only burn 100 watts, compared with the 130 watts of the "Madison" Itanium 2s.

Sun Adds New Opterons to V20z, V40z

Sun Microsystems has announced it is shipping the new Opteron 252 and 852 processors in its Sun Fire V20z two-way and V40z four-way servers. However, for now the processors are only being shipped in heavy configurations of the machines.

In the V20z, you can get the new 2.6 GHz Opteron 252 in an "extra large" configuration with two processors, 4 GB of main memory, a single 73 GB disk drive, and no operating system for $6,395. In the V40z, you can get the Opteron 852 in a server with four processors, 16 GB of main memory, two 73 GB disks, and no operating system for $31,595.

IBM Launches Faster 'Irwindale' Xeon Servers

IBM will this week deliver versions of its xSeries and BladeCenter servers that employ the new "Irwindale" Xeon DP processor from Intel. The Irwindale chip is a variant of the 64-bit "Nocona" processor, except that it has 2 MB of L2 cache memory as well as the new Demand Based Switching and SpeedStep power management and Execute Disable security enhancement. It has an 800 MHz frontside bus, just like the Nocona chip, which means it can plug into the exact same slots (see the separate story in this issue for more on the Irwindale chip).

IBM says that the xSeries and BladeCenter blade servers equipped with the new Irwindale chips, which have twice as much cache memory as the Noconas, can provide as much as an 18 percent performance boost, according to Intel's internal benchmarks. But the Irwindales are expected to run at the same clock speeds as the Noconas, so this will only be true on applications that can make use of that larger cache.

IBM says that the Irwindale chips will ship in four of its two-way servers and the HS20 two-way blade servers by the end of February. The xSeries 226 is a 4U tower or rack machine that supports from 512 MB to 16 GB of main memory, and 1.8 TB of internal SCSI or 1 TB of internal SATA disks, and has three PCI-X, two PCI, and one PCI-Express slot. It costs $1,225 with a single Irwindale chip running at 3 GHz plus 512 MB of memory and no disk; it costs $1,475 to buy the machine with a three-year warranty. The xSeries 236 is a slightly larger 5U tower or rack server that supports the same memory configurations, but has room for nine disks. It has three PCI-X, two PC-Express, and one PCI slot. It comes with a three-year warranty and costs $2,399 with a single 3 GHz processor, 1 GB of main memory, no disks, and a three-year warranty. The xSeries 336 is a 1U, rack-mounted server that can house two disk drives (300 GB SCSI Or 250 GB SATA) and has two PCI-X slots and an optional PCI-Express slot. It supports up to 16 GB of main memory as well, and costs $2,359 in a base configuration (1 GB of memory, one 3 GHz chip, no disk, and a three-year warranty). And, finally, the xSeries 346 is a 2U rack-mounted server with four PCI-X or two PCI-X and two PCI-Express slots that has the same memory expansion as the other Irwindale-based xSeries machines being announced today. A base xSeries 346 comes with one 3 Ghz processor and 1 GB of main memory; it costs $2,745 with that three-year warranty. IBM did not provide pricing on the HS20 blades.

HP Rolls Out New Opteron, Xeon Servers

With LinuxWorld this week, and a lot of bad press last week as Carly Fiorina departed the company, executives at Hewlett-Packard are probably more than thankful to have some product announcements for the media to focus on. This week HP rolled out Intel's new "Irwindale" Xeon DP chips into its ProLiant line, as well as new ProLiants based on rival Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron processors.

Last February, just after Intel had divulged that its "Nocona" Xeon MP would support essentially the same 64-bit memory extensions used by AMD in its Opteron processors, HP announced that the ProLiant DL145, a two-way Opteron machine with many of the same features as the 32-bit Xeon-based DL140, except that it used the Opteron chips, carried a slight premium, and offered anywhere from 30 to 40 percent better performance. A few months later, HP rolled out the ProLiant 585, a four-way Opteron machine very similar to the ProLiant 580, which uses 32-bit Xeon MP processors. This week HP is getting even more aggressive about putting Opterons into its X86 servers, and is rolling out a two-way ProLiant 385 as well as Opteron-based blade servers for its BladeSystem chassis.

While the DL145 is a decent computer and is suitable for people who want a lot of flops and not much more, is it not a small business workhorse like two-way, 2U servers are. According to Paul Miller, vice president of marketing for HP's Industry Standard Server group, the company has sold over 2 million of the DL380 machines in the past four generations. And even though the DL380 G4 supports the 64-bit-capable Nocona Xeon DP processors from Intel, Miller says many customers have told HP they want the Opteron performance of the DL145, but they want the expandability and systems management features that are in the DL380. Hence, the DL385 is being announced. The exact feeds and speeds of the machine are unclear as we go to press, but presumably it will support the dual-core Opteron processors when AMD releases them later this year. In a base configuration, the DL385 will cost $2,899.

Further on the Opteron front, HP is making good on its promise to deliver blade servers for its BladeSystems based on the Opterons chips. The BL25p and BL35p blades are very similar to the existing Xeon-based BL20p and BL30p blades, and, in fact, plug into the same chassis and can even be mixed and matched in the same chassis. Moreover, says Miller, because of the software compatibility of the Opteron and Xeon processors, a Windows or Linux instance running on an Opteron blade can fail over to an instance of the same operating system running on a Xeon blade, or visa versa. "HP is what we call chipnostic," he says with a laugh. "We are seeing customers adopt the Opteron chip because of the better performance it gives on certain applications. Some applications have advantages on Xeon, some on Opteron. We do both, and Dell doesn't."

The BL25p is a two-way blade that can use the existing 2.4 GHz Opteron 250 processor with an 800 MHz HyperTransport bus speed or the new 2.6 GHz Opteron processor with a 1 GHz HT link. Both Opterons have 1 MB of L2 cache memory on chip. The BL25p blade server can have up to 16 GB of main memory and can have two 300 GB hot-plug SCSI disk drives on it. The blade has a dual port Fibre Channel mezzanine card that provides 2Gbps links to storage area networks. The blade also has an embedded Smart Array 6i Plus Ultra3 RAID controller embedded in it for disk mirroring on the blade. The blade, like all other HP blades and most of its servers, has an Integrated Lights Out service processor and system management software. The base BL25p blade costs $3,399.

The BL35p blade is also a two-way server, but it is made for denser environments. Last year, HP rolled out the BL30p Xeon-based blade, which could cram up to 96 servers into a standard 42U rack; the company did this by taking off the SCSI disks on the blades, which allowed it to put 16 instead of 8 blades in a single 6U chassis. The Opteron-based BL35p blade takes the same approach, only is uses the 2.4 GHz Opteron 250 processor. This skinnier Opteron blade can have up to 8 GB of main memory and two 60 GB ATA disk drives. The base BL35p costs $2,899.

While HP is hot to talk about its new Opteron products, it has not forgotten about its Xeon-based products in the least. To that end, the entry uniprocessor ProLiant ML110 G2, which is a tower server, has been beefed up with a 2.8 GHz Celeron or 3.2 GHz Pentium 4 processor (not a Xeon), plus PCI-Express I/O and an optional ILO card. HP is also rolling out a new entry uniprocessor tower server, the ML310, which offers the same processors, either PCI-X or PCI-Express peripherals, and hot-plug RAID. HP is putting a 3.06 GHz Celeron in the DL320 G3 uniprocessor server, which is a 1U rack-mounted machine that now has two PCI-X slots and the option of using SCSI or ATA disks. The ML370 G4 two-way tower server will get the new Irwindale 64-bit Xeon with the 2 MB of L2 cache as well as PCI-Express peripherals. The BL20p G3 blade server will be beefed up using the new 3.6 GHz Nocona chips (not yet Irwindale) as part of this week's announcements. Finally, the DL360 G4 and DL380 G4 servers will get Irwindale chips running at 3.6 GHz. Memory on both of these machines is being expanded up to 12 GB as well.

Sun Boosts Netra 440 Telco Server with Faster UltraSparc-IIIi

Having already upgraded its Sun Fire 210 and 240 two-way servers a few weeks ago, Sun Microsystems announced this week that it has added the 1.6 GHz UltraSparc-IIIi processor to its NEBS-certified Netra 440 server. The Netra 440 is a carrier-grade server aimed at telecommunications, service-provider, and network-equipment builders that need the DC power and ruggedized features that are not standard in commercial servers. The prior Netra 440s topped out with 1.28 GHz processors. In a four-way configuration with 16 GB and four 73 GB disks, the Netra 440 using 1.6 GHz UltraSparc-IIIi costs $31,995 with Solaris 9 and Java Enterprise System installed. Sun says that this offering provides a 36 percent improvement in price/performance compared with the prior Netra 440.

MySQL Offers IP Indemnification for Open Source Database

Open-source database developer MySQL announced yesterday that it will begin providing its customers with intellectual property indemnification to protect them from any patent, trade secret, or copyright infringement lawsuits in the future. IP indemnification is part of the new "MySQL Network" support packages that MySQL announced at the LinuxWorld show in Boston. In addition to IP indemnification, the MySQL Network packages offer enhanced support, certification with applications, access to the MySQL knowledge base, access to Update Advisor (a new service that alerts users to updated MySQL software), and Technical Alert Advisor, which notifies users of issues related to their specific computing environment before they cause problems. MySQL Network is available now for 11 major platforms, including Unix, Linux, and Windows Server 2003, and costs from $595 to $4,995 for an annual subscription.